Social Media: Tools for Learning What Asian Customers Think About Your Company

Who is doing it: Companies like Ogilvy Public Relations and Samsung Electronics that want to understand Asian markets better are using services offered by vendors such as Singapore’s JamiQ to track customer conversations and comments posted online in different languages.

How it works: Marketing executives pay JamiQ $38 per month to follow a topic. JamiQ collects comments from across Asia using public search engines, RSS feeds and its own Web crawler, then filters them using data such as IP addresses and domain names to determine where these conversations are taking place. Social media monitoring provides valuable insights, says Thomas Crampton, Asia-Pacific director of Ogilvy’s 360 Digital Influence practice. But no one service or company effectively covers all Asian social media on its own: Ogilvy relies on multiple tools and its own analysis to make sense of the data.

Growth potential: In North America and Europe, dozens of companies offer Internet-monitoring services. High Internet penetration in markets such as China and Indonesia means the number of Asian social-media-monitoring companies will rise and their quality will improve, says Andrew Milroy, director of Frost and Sullivan’s ICT and digital marketing practice. He also sees demand for companies that can analyze the data these services collect.